


Sexcation

by Lavavulture



Series: Dragon-Somethings [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 18:44:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8024911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavavulture/pseuds/Lavavulture
Summary: Blackwall had a pretty good idea of how he thought this trip should go and none of his plans involved talking rams, bandits, or bottomless lake pits.  Cole commiserates as only the Spirit of Compassion can.





	Sexcation

**Author's Note:**

> Man, this wasn't what I meant to write. As my summer cold turned to summer flu to summer bronchitis to summer "fucking let me not be sick for one fucking minute before Halloween," I wanted something schmoopy to make me feel better. This is the third story in a series but there's really no reason to read those unless you want to read about Sera trying to boink Cole's little sister.

“Well. This is it.” Blackwall stood in the doorway of his old cabin and watched Cole wander around the room, touching things with feather-light fingers before moving on to something else. 

Blackwall thought that the cabin was still in pretty good shape considering he hadn’t been back to the Hinterlands since the last time Trevelyan had gotten it into his head that he wanted to pick more elfroot for a questionable experiment.

Cole looked natural next to his bed, like he’d come straight from the Fade to be there. Blackwall felt his eyelids lower and his breath slow at the sight. 

Despite what all of Skyhold thought, he and Cole had not yet progressed much further than the long, hungry kisses and fevered caresses they’d been stealing nightly for weeks. The closest they’d come was a night spent in guilty rutting that ended when Sera had popped up out of nowhere—like she’d been doing like it was her bloody job—and Blackwall had accidentally sprained Cole’s wrist pushing him out of his lap. He’d felt so profoundly guilty that he’d managed to stay away for three whole days, only to be drawn in again by Cole’s warm persistence.

But that was all behind them. Everyone knew what they were doing now and the Herald had actually seemed pleased by their relationship, as impossible as that seemed to Blackwall. He’d expected Varric or Solas or any number of the Inquisition to string him up by his bootstraps for his perverse lust towards the spirit but other than a few veiled threats if he hurt Cole, nobody seemed to care.

Blackwall believed in luck and he knew he had the worst run of it a man could have and deserved it twice over but it seemed like in this one bright spot, he was going to have a bit of happiness to call his own and nobody was going to point out how wrong it was.

Cole slid his long fingers across Blackwall’s bedsheet and he felt it like a caress on his own skin. He bit the inside of his cheek firmly. He was going to do this right, after so many nights of doing it all so wonderfully wrong. He was going to tumble Cole into his bed with finesse and respect.

“Take your bloody clothes off,” Blackwall said sharply and then scowled to himself. Maker’s Balls. One would think that he was the sodding virgin.

Not that the pale, eager eyes that fixed on him seemed at all virginal. Blackwall supposed when a person could see every dirty fantasy everyone had ever had, a little uncouthness was nothing shocking. Cole just nodded, once, and then slid his hands to the bottom of his worn shirt. Blackwall gripped the doorknob behind him hard and called himself a fool even as he drank in every second of flesh being revealed to him.

All told though Cole only got his shirt up to the top of his waist before a woman’s shriek pierced through the quiet of the cabin.

For a single, terrible moment, Blackwall wanted to ignore it. Surely somebody else would attend to her, maybe it wasn’t anything terrible, maybe it was one of the bloody goats traipsing around and screaming but for the slightest moment Blackwall wished that he was an even worse man than he already was.

But he wasn’t. And he was out of the door even before Cole could react and when he found the family being terrorized by a roaming gang of bandits, he may have beat the thieves down with a little more force than was strictly heroic but Cole looked at him in adoration all the same.

“Don’t fear, lass, they’re gone now,” Blackwall said gruffly to the couple’s young daughter as she trembled behind her mother’s skirt.

“Thank you, ser. Maker, thank you,” the mother said, her round face still flushed with terror. At her side, her husband tried to hide the staff in his hands and blanched when Blackwall turned his attention to him.

“You’d be safer at Skyhod. The Herald welcomes all mages.”

“I’m not a fighter, ser,” the mage said in a shaky voice. “I’ve only a talent for healing and it’s not a large one at that.”

“All the better. We’ve a need for healers.” Blackwall scowled a bit when the man continued to tremble. “You’d be wiser to help in this fight than hide from it. The Herald can fix the hole in the sky but he needs people who can fix his men as well.”

“We’ll go,” the wife said, setting her hand on her husband’s arm and pulling her daughter closer. “Of course we’ll go and help.”

“Pity she’s not the mage,” Blackwall said stiffly as he watched the family march towards the Inquisition camp on the other side of the lake. He turned to ask what Cole thought of the situation and received a mouth full of tongue as his answer.

They stumbled back towards the cabin and Blackwall hoped that they would make it inside before the hand Cole was teasing over his trousers found purchase.

“Pardon me,” came a voice behind them and Blackwall wondered if he was cursed. Perhaps Cole was wrong and the Maker was punishing him for his unforgiveable sins.

Turning Blackwall only saw an oddly-colored ram perched on the rocks behind them. He glanced around, trying to determine who had spoken when Cole walked up to the ram.

“Hello!” Cole said brightly to the ram and pressed his hands together in pleasure. “My name is Cole.”

“You’re Compassion, I believe, but you do look like a Cole. I am called Lord Woolsey by my friends.” Blackwall had seen and heard many strange things in his life but few things had prepared him to have a conversation with a ram, its horned head tilted down politely towards them.

“Your friend misses you,” Cole said, his eyes going distant like they did when he plucked strange thoughts from people’s mind. “You should go back home.”

“Ah, I have been away for a time, haven’t I? Let’s us have a conversation of this world while I return. I don’t meet many of our kind that can keep a civil tongue in their throat.” The ram hopped down the rocks and pushed its head under Cole’s hand. Cole scratched it behind the great horns. “That’s perfect, my friend, yes, absolutely perfect.”

Cole nodded in clear excitement and then paused, considering.

“Oh, I’ll only go part of the way with him?” Cole sounded guilty as he raised flushed cheeks up to Blackwall. He remembered when they’d encountered the spirit Command and Cole had been so endearingly excited to greet it, only for the daft thing to rebuke him. He supposed that Cole had to miss his own kind a little.

“Take your time, lad,” Blackwall said gruffly. “I’ll get us some firewood for tonight.”

And when Cole smiled, small and gap-toothed in pleasure, Blackwall thought that he should probably take a dip in the cool lake first. It was probably a bad idea to chop wood with a prick trying to force its way out of his clothes. 

 

After a few hours spent chopping every scrap of wood he could justify chopping, Blackwall finally sat his axe down and wiped his brow with a sigh. He supposed his dip in the lake had been useless since by this point his bare upper torso was fair dripping in sweat, courtesy of his aggressive chopping and the hot midday sun. Cole was still nowhere to be seen.

No matter. It was still a fine day and a man could truly ask no more of it than to labor until he stumbled into bed, exhausted from honest work. He would be content even if Cole didn’t come back until the next day. And if the lie he was telling himself didn’t bring the lad back, then clearly there were more important things for Cole to do and he’d have to just live one more night with his fantasies.

Blackwall abruptly turned towards the lake and after struggling with his trousers for a few moments, waded out into the cool water in his smallclothes. He went out almost to his chest and stretched out long, watching the slow ripples around him, listening to the birds sing to one another in the trees. He’d grown to love these simple pleasures, so different than what he’d courted in his younger days, when he’d been full of fire and lust and the thrill of battle. Not that there wasn’t still a treacherous appeal in all those things but he hoped one day he would grow beyond them.

“You felt fire when you saved those people,” Cole said behind him. Blackwall turned his head and saw the spirit sitting on the dock. His long legs were skimming just above the surface and he was staring at Blackwall’s broad, hairy chest.

“A man should do what’s right, whether his blood calls out for it or not,” Blackwall said sternly but his words lacked some bite in the face of Cole’s open admiration of his body. He had thought that he’d buried all of the pride that had landed him in the beds of sighing noble maidens, but he felt a taste of it shiver through him as Cole watched him. The feeling straightened his spine and darkened his eyes as he nodded out towards Cole. “You’ve been hours on the road, lad. Why don’t you join me for a swim?”

Cole tilted his head. “I don’t think I know how to swim.”

“Don’t know how to swim? That’s not right.” Blackwall came up to the dock. He wrapped his hand around Cole’s ankle and tugged lightly, letting his thumb tease around the exposed skin. “I’ll teach you then. A nice swim before sunset.” 

 

In his panic Blackwall hauled Cole out of the water with more force than he intended and nearly brained him against a log. To his relief the spirit just rolled over and immediately began coughing as soon as he hit land. Blackwall awkwardly rubbed his back as he continued to cough.

“I didn’t know there was a drop there, lad. I’m so sorry.” Blackwall wondered if it was too dramatic for him to throw himself off of the nearest precipice and let the Maker figure out what to do with his woebegotten hide.

Cole clawed his fingers into Blackwall’s wet beard and forced out an admonishment in-between coughs, “It’s not your fault. The ground tricked us both.” 

“I’ve swum in this lake for months,” Blackwall said but decided he’d give up arguing for his guilt when Cole responded by tugging balefully on his beard instead of trying to force more words between his coughs. Blackwall helped Cole to his feet and curved his arm around his wet back. “Let’s get in front of the fire.”

 _And Andraste keep me from burning the bloody cabin down next_ , Blackwall thought as they walked towards the door.

Cole tugged on his beard again, but more gently this time. Blackwall assumed that this meant that the spirit half-agreed with him.

 

“I can’t move my arms now,” Cole said. He sounded annoyed, which was the only thing that kept Blackwall from cocooning him in yet another blanket despite his protests. 

“How’s your throat?” Blackwall asked, hovering above Cole’s lumpy blanketed figure. He had to ask because the lad’s voice sounded rough and ruined and he needed to remind himself that it was from Cole’s attempts at coughing up his water-logged lungs and not something more tantalizing.

“I like the honey in the tea,” Cole responded and twisted around in his blanket shell until he could push one of his arms out and towards his cup. “I can still hear the buzzing, busy and bustling in the hive. Sera likes bees but she doesn’t like the honey. My sister likes honey but not the bees.”

Cole looked perplexed for a moment over this incongruity and then apparently satisfied himself by drinking a healthy gulp of the tea. “I like both, I think.”

“You must be feeling better,” Blackwall said, hiding a fond smile in his own flagon. 

Cole lifted his head and reached his hand out towards Blackwall. “I don't need all the blankets if you wanted to sit with me.”

Blackwall could recognize an invitation when he heard one—and Maker knows he’d been on the receiving end of ones more subtle than that—but he hesitated even after he took Cole’s hand in his own. Cole’s fingers still felt cold. They generally always did but after seeing him struggling for air, his fish-belly white skin already a good match for the corpses in the Fallow Mire, Blackwall felt the urge to ferry Cole back to the camp healer.

But he knew that he was overreacting. Cole was fine or at least fine as he ever seemed to be and the warm spark in his eyes told Blackwall that he wanted something much more immediate than the distant courtesy of a healer.

“I imagine you’d need fewer still if I took their place,” he said and set his flagon on the mantel above the fireplace. Cole shivered when he pulled the blankets off of him but Blackwall didn’t think that it was from any chill. If it was, it was certainly extinguished by the warmth of his body when he pressed Cole down onto the fur-lined floor. Cole slid his arms up and around his shoulders as Blackwall kissed along his neck, finding the tender places he’d been so diligently exploring for weeks. Weeks they could have been doing so much more. He sighed into the crook of Cole’s shoulder. “I’ve been such a fool.”

“The camp is on fire,” Cole said.

Blackwall blinked hard, his mouth still searching along Cole’s cool skin. He lifted up when Cole began pushing at him. “What?”

“There was a spark in his pipe that he didn’t see and dry grass all around and now three tents are on fire,” Cole said in a rush as he began trying to pull his water-soaked leathers back on. Cole huffed out in frustration when his clothes wouldn’t cooperate and abandoned them to go through the door. 

Blackwall had several seconds while he was trying to process what was happening when a perfect vision of the future came to him; Cole running into camp bare to the world that could now see him perfectly in order to save some bloody stupid soldiers that had set their own tents on fire. The idea was so ludicrous that he knew he would laugh later—probably while he was retelling the story to Sera—but for now he could only manage to grab some of his spare clothes and chase after him.

 

The camp was indeed on fire and by the time they got there, all of the tents had caught aflame while the scouts raced around trying to put it out. Blackwall took a second once he entered the camp to curse the stupidity of everyone he saw before he took over their disorganized efforts. 

By the time that they managed to put out the fire, Blackwall was covered in soot, powerfully sore, and possessing his own hoarse voice, not strained by desire but by all the bloody smoke he’d been breathing in for the past two hours. He wrecked it even more by giving the men a thorough and colorful lecture on their own blind, oblivious assholery before Cole pulled him away.

When they got back to the cabin, Blackwall thought about diving back into the lake to try to rid himself of the smoke permeating every inch of him but a quick glance at Cole’s wan face changed his mind. It should have been amusing—and not a little arousing—to see Cole wearing his clothes but he looked so spent that Blackwall could only see one outcome for the night.

“Come, lad. Let’s to bed and end this bloody day.” Blackwall led Cole back into the cabin and settled him into his bed. He was going to go sleep in his chair for the night, out of consideration for the hectic day Cole had experienced, but Cole pulled him roughly into bed with him. Blackwall’s sigh was bittersweet as Cole stretched out long beside him and immediately fell asleep. His mouth found its way to press chastely to Cole’s forehead before he sighed again. “Goodnight, Cole.”

 

The next morning Blackwall woke when a sharp clattering sounded in front of him. He opened his eyes, which was harder than it should have been since his eyelids felt pasted together, and blearily watched as Cole picked up an assortment of plates and the food that was meant to be on them.

“It won’t taste differently. It doesn’t know it’s been on the floor,” Cole said when he caught Blackwall watching him put a loaf of bread back onto a plate. 

Blackwall huffed in partial agreement but for some reason the idea of the food made his stomach twist in protest even as his eyes struggled to close on their own accord. He forced them fully open again when Cole came beside the bed. Cole looked worried.

“There’s a different fire in you,” Cole murmured and pressed his cool hand to Blackwall’s forehead. It felt like everything the Chantry said the afterlife was like, perfection centered in five long fingers and a soft palm against his skin.

“I’m fine,” Blackwall said gruffly even as he pressed harder into Cole’s cool touch. He struggled to sit up and then tried to stand. The world swam around him like a rift and he found himself on his back again, staring up at his ceiling and Cole’s pointed face. “I’m not fine. Maker’s Arse!”

“Rest,” Cole said, pulling the blanket up to Blackwall’s chin. Despite how good Cole’s cool fingers had been, the warm blanket was a godsend as well when Blackwall became aware of the deep shivers wracking his body.

“This ruddy trip is not going the way I’d hoped it would,” Blackwall told Cole who nodded in solemn agreement.

He’d been right all along. The Maker was punishing him. 

 

He was sick for nearly five days, close to delirious at points and so miserable the rest of the time that he could do little more than listen as Cole told him sweet stories he hadn’t heard since he’d been a child, stories that had instilled in him a desire for adventure and romance.

"It's what I wanted to be," Blackwall said in rough, stumbling speech when Cole finished telling him the story of a great Marcher knight, bold and fearless. "I dreamt about it at night and played it during the day. I wanted to be a great man."

"You still can be. People can be different," Cole murmured, sliding his long, cool fingers over his forehead as Blackwall's eyes worked their way closed once again, sending his arguments sliding back down his throat. 

On the last day of his illness—the day they’d planned on beginning their return trip to Skyhold—Blackwall woke feeling rejuvenated. He pushed the heavy blankets off of him and began dressing. They had to go back but surely they could push back their return trip for just a few hours, just long enough for him to express the depth of his gratitude towards a wonderful benevolent spirit.

He found Cole sitting on a rock and staring out into the lake, all long limbs and a distant face. Blackwall wrapped his arms around him. “What are we eyeing here?”

Cole smiled, slight, and pressed back against him. “There’s a hand in the lake that’s missing a lady. It’s supposed to make a kingdom but it’ll give Trevelyan its boon if he gives it blood and flowers.”

“More tales,” Blackwall murmured as he began to kiss down Cole’s neck. “I’ve enough of charming tales these past few days. I’d rather have the storyteller for a bit.”

Cole turned around on the rock and kissed him. It was like a bough broke inside them and Blackwall knew that all his romantic ideas of how this should go were about to be pushed to the ground in front of his cabin.

He hoped none of the other rams in the area were mouthy enough to tell anybody what they were seeing. 

“Wonderful trip,” Blackwall said, his blood racing hot through him as he ran his hands down Cole’s long back to grip at his backside, pulling him into a rhythm against him. “Best I’ve ever had.”

Cole moaned out in what Blackwall could only take to be perfect agreement.


End file.
